I have to admit i too get very tired of people asking too specific questions. I don't mind when someone asks something like "How do you achieve so good looking metal materials", but i often get questions like "give metal settings plz". That just implies these people do not intend to understand any context of what they are doing. They just want to copy the exact data sequence without any comprehension of what the hell it is they are doing. And use that same sequence until someone tells them better one.
I remember someone asking me about how to make some simple leather material, and i gave him exhaustingly long explanation of how material parameters work, what each of them does, how one should go about using them to create various types of materials, even some rules of thumb on how to use Fresnel IOR and so on. I think it was almost 2 A4 pages of text. And then the person just sent me the picture of leather chair asking "how to make this leather" and then sending more pictures of various concretes, glass materials, metals, and so on, without any signs of even reading the long essay i wrote him. It was completely wasted time, ever since that, i try to avoid answering people who ask too specific question, because it's usually very good indication that they do not understand the context of what they do, and they probably don't even want to.
Like seriously... if you know just basic principals of image based lighting and image dynamic range, which is not that hard to understand, and average untalented person can still learn in within one day of reading, then you easily know what kind of HDRI map should you search for, when you need to achieve certain lighting setting, and you easily know, how to evaluate assets available on internet and pick the right one.
That HDRI map will not automagically make your rendering looking exactly like rendering of the person you asked for it. There's lot more to that. Mostly it's just hundreds of little workflow details that add up together to create great looking output. And those little details are impossible to implement unless you know the context you are doing. So if some asks me too specific thing, then I usually get impression answering would be just waste of my time, because it would not help the person anyway, as they do not show any intention of trying to understand the context.
Same goes for materials. Particular sequence of settings is not what makes good looking materials. It's knowing the material itself... all the parameters, and all the available maps, and how all these things work in context, what allows you to create great looking materials. Because once you know the context, then you can get truly creative with it, while still not losing grips of knowing what you are doing, and knowing how to get to the exact result you need without getting stuck anywhere.
So to wrap it up... for me, ultimately, it's when the question i get shows some actual amount of interest in the topic, i get a feeling that my answer will actually be worth the time and will help the person who asked it. And these kinds of questions are usually easy to identify based on how specific they are.
But then again, honestly, here i would probably also ask about the HDRI. Not because i expect it to automatically make me create pictures of the same quality, but simply because the map just looks pretty :)